The Passion of Artemisia
Susan Vreeland
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible -- determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders...”
“Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices.”
“What could she possibly have done that was so heinous as to earn her a lifetime of self-mortification? No one short of a tyrant deserved such unremitting agony. I cried there with her, for her, for Eve, for sorrows past, for sorrows yet to come. I put my pencil away. It was wrong to draw live pain. If there had been an artist at Bethany, it would have been wrong to intrude his chalk or charcoal on Mary Magdalene’s weeping as she washed Jesus’ feet. Some things were too raw for art until time dulled their sharpness.”
“It’s better to have a hunger and appreciation for beauty than to be merely beautiful. In the end, life is richer that way. She may learn that.”
“Things will change, Father. They must. And art can help create the change.”
“If a person loves something above all else, if he values the work of his heart and hands, then he should naturally, without hesitation, pour into it his whole soul, undivided and pure. Great art demands nothing less.”
“At some times in our lives, our passion makes us perpetrators of hurt and loss. At other times we are the ones who are hurt—all in the name of art. Sometimes we get what we want. Sometimes we pay for another to get what he or she wants.”
“A moon of startling brightness rose over the rooftops, lifted on a divine, invisible thread...”
“Which one is really my child? The one I brought forth with my own groans who has no liking for the thing I love most in all the world, or the stranger’s child whom fate placed in my life, the one who is absorbing and treasuring every word I give her, whose eyes are learning every day, whom I would love to teach...”
“When Constantine was told that the Roman rabble had stoned the head of his statue, he raised his hands to his head and said, ‘How remarkable. I don’t feel the least bit hurt.”
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